No Take-Backs
Inside this box
is not just anything,
but a singing spark
of lemon rind.
The smallest unit
of bitterness.
What almost
hurts is gone.
You owe me.
I’ve left the pale
graduates feeding
their copy cats
Latinate consommé,
the girl dressed
only in cursive.
For you. For this
old attribution:
the imperfect
listener, whom
I love like I love
beginnings: the pod
of pronouns
darting through
the kelp beds,
or the uncertain dusk
in the field
as lightning bugs—
name of Lampyridae—
choose to be
skidding or implicit.
I don’t want you
to get the idea
that I’m not in
this poem—I can
lower my voice,
I can repeat myself.
I can tell you
I hate anaphora
and its lexical dignity
of being late Greek,
meaning to carry
or branch.
Are you still with me?
It’s lonely watching
over my tanker,
feeling the weight
of all that ambrosia,
ichor, ether,
and crude—the body
parsed into oils
and punctuation.
Look: we’re aloft,
held up—for
however long—
by this span of grammar
and the diminished if
in every beat.
A Note on the Type
This stanza is dead
on the page. A small
blue vase on a dock
on the Isle of Hydra
killed it. A modifier
split it down
the middle with one
touch—and now
we have Mercury’s
shin splints, a half-
hearted encephalogram,
and 693 lackluster
boys eating dirt. Any one
of these would have
been unmanageable.
Let us read Bembo,
Gaudy, Aldonza,
and Light Fortini
over its grave: carefully
shaded fonts wired
by an unemployed
electrician in Brighton
who collects stairwells.
The trope gives off
a deprecating odor
of glue, and if we listen
hard we hear a horse
thrashing in the light
breeze of plot. No dice.
No matter what they say
in the universities,
this coffin and its tiny,
scribbled universe
cannot be used
by the willing
as a flotation device. 
Simeon Berry lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, where he serves on the Board of Directors for Salamander. He has been an Associate Editor for Ploughshares, and has won a Massachusetts Cultural Council Individual Artist Grant and a Career Chapter Award from the National Society of Arts and Letters. Recent work appears in Hotel Amerika, Western Humanities Review, Gulf Coast, and American Letters & Commentary. In 2013, his manuscript Ampersand Revisited was selected by Ariana Reines for The National Poetry Series, and will be published by Fence Books in 2014.
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